The Donkey Kong Country games on SNES are not fun games. They are filled with areas that need memorization and they have a difficulty curve that goes too steep. I slogged through the first game till the last world then couldn’t do it anymore. The attempts at the other two were equally not fun.
It has basically been my life mission to defend games people think are bad.
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Every video game is good.
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The Game Gear didn’t use enough batteries
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Shovel Knight is super mid.
So is Nier: Automata. Actually, kind of everything Platinum has ever made is not that great.
The Warriors is the best thing that Rockstar has ever put out, and it’s not even close.
Racing games are better where there’s no cosmetic damage on the cars when you crash
Generally speaking, aesthetic are more important than gameplay, and that’s often reflected in sales (see first point)
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any game with multiplayer is good because they facilitate having fun with your friends. this includes frotnite
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Mario Party is exempt because it will create enemies for life.
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The only Nintendo controller I enjoy using is SNES/SFC. All others have several glaring pain points that makes me wish I was using anything else (almost always involving the d-pad)
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Yes, I fully agree. Whenever people claim that “Nintendo always have good D-pads” I wonder what kind of controllers they’ve been using, because I’ve never seen them.
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I never thought to speak this opinion into existence but you’re so right. If my car looks bad at the end of the race I want to start over. Honestly this even applies to like GTA to an extent. So frustrating going to pick up your homie for a platonic date and slamming into a pole
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The Warriors game, while I never played it, has always stuck out in my mind as it was a movie game made decades after the movie came out. And it was good! It was praised by critics! I remember seeing the Game Informer review of it and being amazed it existed.
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This is why we need Outrun to come back.
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Oh, here’s a huge one: no genres are actually dead, and anyone saying they are is speaking to their own lack of awareness/interest in said genre
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Dude, that game owns so hard man. Now, I will say that it goes back to my other claim that aethestics are as/more important than gameplay, and the PS2 was able to perfectly render the grime of a 1970’s gang movie. Also, it is genuinely a blast to play. Bully took a lot of the good stuff from The Warriors and simplified it while adding bloat, which makes me sad.
And the only exception to the “damaged cars are less fun” rule is Burnout, but I would argue that the Burnout games are not racing games.
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==Preamble==
This definition of “Roguelike” was created at the International Roguelike Development Conference 2008 and is the product of a discussion between all who attended. The definition at A Classic Roguelike – Temple of The Roguelike was used as the starting point for the discussions. Most factors are newly phrased, new factors have been added, some factors have been removed.
==General Principles==
“Roguelike” refers to a genre, not merely “like-Rogue”. The genre is represented by its canon. The canon for Roguelikes is ADOM, Angband, Crawl, Nethack, and Rogue. This list can be used to determine how roguelike a game is. Missing some points does not mean the game is not a roguelike. Likewise, possessing some points does not mean the game is a roguelike. The purpose of the definition is for the roguelike community to better understand what the community is studying. It is not to place constraints on developers or games.
==High value factors==
====Random environment generation====
The game world is randomly generated in a way that increases replayability. Appearance and placement of items is random. Appearance of monsters is fixed, their placement is random. Fixed content (plots or puzzles or vaults) removes randomness.
====Permadeath====
You are not expected to win the game with your first character. You start over from the first level when you die. (It is possible to save games but the savefile is deleted upon loading.) The random environment makes this enjoyable rather than punishing.
====Turn-based====
Each command corresponds to a single action/movement. The game is not sensitive to time, you can take your time to choose your action.
====Grid-based====
The world is represented by a uniform grid of tiles. Monsters (and the player) take up one tile, regardless of size.
====Non-modal====
Movement, battle and other actions take place in the same mode. Every action should be available at any point of the game. Violations to this are ADOM’s overworld or Angand’s and Crawl’s shops.
====Complexity====
The game has enough complexity to allow several solutions to common goals. This is obtained by providing enough item/monster and item/item interactions and is strongly connected to having just one mode.
====Resource management====
You have to manage your limited resources (e.g. food, healing potions) and find uses for the resources you receive.
====Hack’n’slash====
Even though there can be much more to the game, killing lots of monsters is a very important part of a roguelike. The game is player- vs-world: there are no monster/monster relations (like enmities, or diplomacy).
====Exploration and discovery====
The game requires careful exploration of the dungeon levels and discovery of the usage of unidentified items. This has to be done anew every time the player starts a new game.
==Low value factors==
====Single player character====
The player controls a single character. The game is player-centric, the world is viewed through that one character and that character’s death is the end of the game.
====Monsters are similar to players====
Rules that apply to the player apply to monsters as well. They have inventories, equipment, use items, cast spells etc.
====Tactical challenge====
You have to learn about the tactics before you can make any significant progress. This process repeats itself, i.e. early game knowledge is not enough to beat the late game. (Due to random environments and permanent death, roguelikes are challenging to new players.) The game’s focus is on providing tactical challenges (as opposed to strategically working on the big picture, or solving puzzles).
====ASCII display====
The traditional display for roguelikes is to represent the tiled world by ASCII characters.
====Dungeons====
Roguelikes contain dungeons, such as levels composed of rooms and corridors.
====Numbers====
The numbers used to describe the character (hit points, attributes etc.) are deliberately shown.
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I can’t even say my normal one (that FFXIII is good) these days, as people seem to be coming around on it. I think the sequels are demonstrably worse than the original, though, which still seems to be somewhat contrarian, as does XIII being my pick for “the best one”
Some others off the top of my head (some of which that have come up here and there already):
- Fallout New Vegas is pretty average. It never properly brings the two halves of its story (the courier revenge plot and the future of New Vegas) together in a coherent fashion, even if lots of the stuff around the two main story threads is great
- Baldur’s Gate 3 has similar problems (with different causes) because it places such a premium on the illusion of player freedom that all it can do is cobble together a story from a bunch of disconnected pieces. This makes it feel about as impactful narratively as a modern Assassin’s Creed game. The game does not, in any way at all, deserve the 3 in its title, either, and it would have been a better game if they didn’t try to tie it so much to the original trilogy (the real Baldur’s Gate III is effectively Throne of Bhaal anyway, since that was an expansion pack instead of a sequel in part because BioWare was navigating around the terms of their licensing agreement to finish the story)
- FFVI is also pretty mid (for a Final Fantasy anyway): its large cast hampers its ability to tell the strong character stories it clearly wants to focus on, and it would have been a much better game if it had focused instead on a smaller more central cast, like most other Fantasies Final
- The worship of game balance in non-competitive multiplayer games is generally bad and results in shallow, sterile experiences. This applies to lots of games, but I don’t think anything exemplifies it quite so well as the combat gameplay side of FFXIV’s theme park
- Grind serves a useful purpose, particularly in MMORPGs, and when used judiciously, helps create more memorable games and experiences in them. MMOs in particular also kind of fall apart without it because developers can’t keep up with making new content (hi again, FFXIV)
- Oh, and Dragon Age II is the best one
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As someone who’s been playing MvC2 to the exclusion of all other fighting games since that rollback port, I would extend this to competitive games as well. Chess is a 5.5-4.5 match up and we’ve been playing it for hundreds of years without a patch
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While I don’t want a game that allows me to basically become a god every time I play it, focusing so much on balance does hurt games.
A great, modern example is Helldivers 2. It’s non-competitive multiplayer and the devs kept nerfing the player’s weapons/abilities. It was making players really mad. It’s a game where the players are basically super soldiers going up against bugs, robots, and zombies. Of COURSE players want to have a power trip and they should have pretty powerful stuff to fight with. They eventually made the player stronger and the game is better for it.
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I’m fine with competitive multiplayer games occasionally giving me a bot team to kill in unranked modes to boost my confidence. Marvel Rivals does this and I wish no one had ever told me. Despite being bad at most competitive games, I don’t like to lose. I would like to win every single round, and I enjoy those rounds where my K/D is like 25/0. I keep voice chat off (except for friends) and I never play anything ranked anyway. Just let me have my fun.
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Yeah, I’d say this is also true, though I think competitive games do need to strive for closer to 50/50 (the 55/45 split for Chess is about right, naturally) than non-competitive ones ought to
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